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Measuring Media Market Diversity: Concentration, Importance, And Pluralism, Brian C. Hill

Federal Communications Law Journal

The Third Circuit's rejection of the FCC's application of its Diversity Index in setting Cross-Media Limits in Prometheus Radio Project v. FCC represented a significant setback for the FCC's media ownership policies. This Article argues that the FCC's Diversity Index is fatally flawed because it fails to simultaneously account for two assumptions shared by the FCC and the Third Circuit: diversity in a media market increases with ownership concentration, and an individual entity's contribution to diversity increases with the weighted market shares of that entity's outlets. The Author proposes an alternative index that does satisfy both assumptions before applying the …